Sunday, January 4, 2015

Last year I attended a Sustainable Seafood panel in LA presented by The Los Angeles Food Policy Council & Sustainable Seafood LA, and I learned a lot about seafood consumption in the US and the world.

Here are some facts about seafood you may not know:

America is the 2nd largest consumer of seafood in the world (the first is China).

We take half a billion pounds of seafood out of ocean each day.

90% of US seafood is imported.

Shrimp is the #1 consumed seafood in US. Most of these are imported from Thailand. The 2nd most consumed is tuna. Pacific blue fin tuna, as you may already know, is depleted. But you can still eat skipjack tuna (which makes up 60% of canned tuna these days), albacore, and yellowfin.

50% of the world's seafood is from aquaculture (mostly from China).

70% of the fish in US is consumed in restaurants. That means chefs play a very important part in seafood sustainability!

2% of all research and development dollars go to USDA. Only 0.4% of that goes to aquaculture research.